Word: islamabad
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...series of attacks, a remote-controlled bomb ripped through a music shop in Peshawar on Monday night. The explosion came just hours after Richard Holbrooke, the Obama Administration's special representative to the region, and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Islamabad for their first visit since Washington announced its new strategy for the region. The morning before, 22 people were killed by a suicide bomber outside a mosque in Chakwal, a Punjabi town known for its links to the army. And on Saturday night, six paramilitary soldiers died after a suicide bomber...
...bombing campaign was retribution for CIA-operated drone attacks that have begun to shower on his fighters since the Obama Administration decided to broaden its range of targets. By focusing on Mehsud, who recently aligned his forces with al-Qaeda and Taliban elements mounting cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, Islamabad and Washington are in a rare moment of agreement. While the Pakistani political and military leadership has discreetly authorized U.S. drone attacks on its soil, the government ritually denounces them in public as a violation of its sovereignty in a bid to contain a hostile public...
...premier intelligence agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is continuing to back its traditional clients in the jihadist underworld. "There are challenges associated with the ISI's support, historically, for some groups, and I think it's important that that support ends," Mullen told reporters in Islamabad on Tuesday. In its military operations, Pakistan's army has taken on al-Qaeda and militants fighting inside Pakistan but has not targeted those militants - including Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, believed to be hiding in Quetta - who attack only U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan...
...role of the ISI and these militants will feature prominently in Holbrooke and Mullen's meeting with the Pakistani leadership, says Najam Sethi, a newspaper editor and a prominent supporter of Islamabad's alliance with Washington against militancy. Pakistani politicians and analysts believe that the military establishment, in its enduring efforts to counter Indian influence in the region, is reluctant to change course until there is a Pakistan-friendly regime installed in Kabul and a resolution to the Kashmir dispute. One politician described the fear of being squeezed from both borders as "being caught in a nutcracker." (Find...
Sherry Rehman, a prominent member of Zardari's ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and a former minister, echoes the sentiment but allows that Islamabad should step up in its own efforts to battle the militants. "What is not helpful is saying that it is someone else's war," she says. "Yes, it may have arisen from interventions in the past such as in the Afghan jihad, but this is a very clear [and] present challenge. Whether it is homegrown or not, it is now in Pakistan, and solutions can only come up at a national level. International intervention...